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Near the beginning of the movie Fight Club, Brad Pitt’s character, Tyler Durden, has an airplane conversation with the hapless narrator, Ed Norton:

Tyler Durden: Oh I get it, it’s very clever.

Narrator: Thank you.

Tyler Durden: How’s that working out for you?

Narrator: What?

Tyler Durden: Being clever.

A lot of folks who work at BlackBerry (née RIM) must be dying to ask Mike Lazaridis, Jim Balsillie and Thorsten Heins that same question.

The Waterloo-based company, as you’ve probably heard, is circling the bowl. BlackBerry is letting 4,500 staff go after a disastrous second quarter in which it posted losses of close to a billion dollars. So, based on that, the answer to Tyler Durden’s question would be: “Dreadfully.”

So dreadfully, in fact, that soon we probably won’t have BlackBerry to kick around anymore. Financial turkey vultures have already caught the stink of death and are bickering about how to carve up the cooling body. Meanwhile, BlackBerry executives say they will lurch forward, like an extra in the Walking Dead, concentrating on the high-end consumer and corporate market. That’s about as honest as a politician saying they’re leaving office to “spend more time with my family.” Really, what serious smartphone company would willingly leave the consumer market behind in 2013? Especially when the corporate space, in the age of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) programs means that the lines between consumer and corporate are as blurred as chalk graffiti. BlackBerry going to ground in the corporate world is retrograde and delusional.

So, how did this happen? How did a brilliant technical mind like Lazaridis end up watching his brainchild tumble from Silicon Valley North poster child to a gormless loser in a half dozen years?

In June 2007, Apple released the iPhone. A couple of former BlackBerry engineers told me the novel touchscreen phone was laughed at inside RIM. It was, they said, considered a toy. That’s the classic reaction of an incumbent when a disruptive innovation appears. But, if you didn’t see that the iPhone dramatically changed the smartphone game, you were data blind.

After all, RIM argued, the BlackBerry, had secure email, BlackBerry Messenger and a physical keyboard. What serious phone user wouldn’t want all three? Turns out, quite a few, actually. Government employees and MBAs still holstered their BlackBerrys with pride. Kids, looking for cheap messaging, thumbed their Pearls, but a whole new market was rising.

It is not too simplistic to say that BlackBerry’s woes are due to Lazaridis and Balsillie:

1. being pigheaded and arrogant;

2. not understanding that after the iPhone people didn’t want a phone, they wanted a mobile computer;

3. imagining that normal humans cared more about engineering arcana than being able to play Plants vs. Zombies in a Tim Hortons lineup.

Even after it became clear that the future was about touchscreens, BlackBerry waited a year and a half to respond with the god-awful BlackBerry Storm, while still betting on a physical keyboard on most of its models. By then, a phone with a physical keyboard was already starting to look like it was powered by steam. The 2010 BlackBerry Torch, a painful touchscreen/keyboard hybrid, continued the tradition of the company not being willing to give up on its past.

But, during that time, mainstream Canadian business press and tech bloggers, given BlackBerry touchscreen devices at swank events, continued to pretend that BlackBerry was a serious player. In private, however, those same bloggers would tell you that, really, phones like the Torch were unusable junk.

And the business press, writing for government and corporate users, rarely addressed the reality that the Waterloo darling might have been good at making email-centric phones, but was now making terrible smartphones, devices for which phone calls and even (for younger users) email were secondary uses. And, BBM, once a unique selling feature, was being attacked by iMessage and other free SMS apps on competing platforms. And BlackBerry secure email? Cracks appeared in 2011 when government officials in India requested access to secure emails on RIM devices. The dispute over access wasn’t resolved until earlier this year (India won), but the damage was done. And these days, nobody actually believes email is secure.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., Lazaridis and Balsillie were being portrayed as Canadian chuckleheads who were missing opportunity after opportunity to keep their company’s stock out of the dumper. Unfettered by the boosterism to the north, U.S. bloggers and podcasters have been predicting the demise of BlackBerry for years. Its tablet, the Playbook, was savaged when it was introduced in 2011 — sans email, sans calendar and sans a hope in hell of unseating the iPad. And Lazaridis didn’t help things by bizarre appearances on the BBC, during a 2011 earnings call, and at that year’s Dive Into Mobile conference.

In each, he comes off as a delusional and defensive gearhead completely out of touch with where the market is headed and what average consumers really wanted. And that need was being admirably filled by Apple, Samsung, Google and a host of Android-powered smartphones that just kept getting better and better. The U.S. media may have been cruel to BlackBerry and Lazaridis, but they were cruelly honest. In fact anyone outside the echo chamber of Canadian “CrackBerry” users could see how the RIM/BlackBerry story would end. And, today, in a market clearly dominated by large touchscreens, BlackBerry has released the Q10, a physical keyboard phone with a 720×720 screen that is laughable as a mobile computer compared to the HTC One, Samsung Galaxy S4 or iPhone 5S.

Could BlackBerry have turned itself around? Maybe if it hadn’t been so engineering-driven, prideful and market-aware. Maybe, if the Canadian media had called it to account far sooner for producing phones the market no longer cared about. Maybe if it had understood the dramatic and disruptive innovation of the iPhone. But I doubt it. It’s often the case that the curse of being smart is that you think you’re smart about everything. And that hubris has led to 4,500 Canadians looking for work. Clever. Hmm. How’s that working out for you?

Wayne MacPhail has been a print and online journalist for 25 years, and is a long-time writer for rabble.ca on technology and the Internet.

Photo: Enrique Dans/flickr

wayne

Wayne MacPhail

Wayne MacPhail has been a print and online journalist for 25 years. He was the managing editor of Hamilton Magazine and was a reporter and editor at The Hamilton Spectator until he founded Southam InfoLab,...